ONE of the 10 best American movies re leased so far this year, “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl” is the surprisingly satisfying first theatrical film inspired by a long-running series of historically themed dolls.
I’ve not seen three earlier TV movies based on other books in the series, but this one, starring a terrific Abigail Breslin and set during the Great Depression, turns out through an accident of timing to be amazingly relevant to our times.
Kit’s family is facing foreclosure on its home after her father (Chris O’Donnell) loses his business and leaves Cincinnati in search of a job in Chicago.
Though Kit still has enough costume changes that her fans will demand their parents patronize American Girl Stores, the movie presents an amazingly gritty view of the 1930s for a G-rated movie. A scene in which a shocked Kit discovers her father at a charity soup kitchen packs more wallop than anything in “Cinderella Man.”
An aspiring reporter, 10-year-old Kit redirects her typewriter from secondhand accounts of the Chicago World’s Fair to the changes at her once solidly middle-class home. Her kindly mother (Julia Ormond) is forced to sell eggs and take in boarders – and defies her pals to befriend a pair of young hobos (Max Thieriot and Willow Smith), whose relationship is fascinatingly ambiguous.
When one of them is accused of a series of crimes that sends the cops into the shantytown where they live, the socially conscious Kit turns Nancy Drew to save the day.
Veteran Canadian director Patricia Rozema (“Mansfield Park”) and screenwriter Ann Peacock (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”) never talk down to their young audience, and the period detail is impressive for a modestly budgeted film (whose producers include Julia Roberts).
Sporting a blond wig, “Little Miss Sunshine” star Breslin is spunky perfection, and the filmmakers have surrounded her with a well-chosen cast. Among its members are Joan Cusack as a mobile librarian who has trouble driving her truck, Stanley Tucci as a shady magician, Jane Krakowski as a lonely dance instructor, and Wallace Shawn as a crusty newspaper editor.
“Kit Kittredge” is a thoughtful history lesson that speaks across the decades. The little girls behind me weren’t the only ones sniffling at a scene in which a boy (Zach Mills) admits to Kit that he forged a letter from his long-gone father for the benefit of his bereft mom (Glenne Headly).
KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL
Little Miss Depression.
Running time: 100 minutes. Rated G. At the Ziegfeld, 54th Street and Sixth Avenue.